Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I downloaded this book because I was on the Reedsy mailing list - which is also how I found out (after suffering through the whole book, wading through the fluff to find the four or five kernels of useful, actionable marketing tips) that the author had actually never published or marketed his own book before. Here is a line from the email: "[In this email] I plan to reveal, in a fully honest and transparent way, what this first book launch has taught me." And this, where he asks a question from the audience and then proves he lacks experience on his chosen topic: "[Q] Wait, but if you just released a book on book marketing, aren’t you supposed to know everything already? [A]You’d think so, right? But for starters, theory and reality are two different things." So... you're saying that the book is full of "theories" about book marketing, not the reality. Terrific. The book is full of supposedly expert tips about the best way to launch your book, but you can't really be an expert in something if you have never done it before. And this is clear from the vagueness of the book, of all the "almost" tips instead of concrete instructions to follow. In many sections, it comes off as something like one of those self-help books where it says something like "find your center," but never tells you how to go about doing that. One example off the top of my head is the section about mailing lists. He says that every author should have one and that you should offer freebies to people who sign up for it (and then more freebies and more freebies, which seems a bit excessive, but okay)... but then he doesn't really tell you where exactly to find people to sign up if you don't already have a following. Even putting aside the fact that the author misrepresents himself, most of the information in the book is easily found on the internet, so there isn't much here that is new. But the absolute most infuriating thing about this book is that the entire thing is just a 350-page ad for Reedsy. Every chapter (sometimes every page) includes some sentence like "but I already talked about this in an article on Reedsy, here's a link to check it out!" or "I don't know much about this, but so and so from Reedsy does! Check the footnotes for a link to his/her course!" There are only two reasons I am giving this book two stars instead of one: 1. It is free. The author is not trying to charge money for this, which is good because there isn't much of value in it, and nothing you can't find without doing a free internet search on your own. 2. The author does know enough about marketing to have convinced hundreds of people on Reedsy's mailing list to download his book even though it isn't very helpful, so maybe he isn't quite as inept as he seems. If you are an indie author looking for answers about book marketing, look elsewhere. Preferably in a book written by someone who has actually done it before.